Nope. The problem is manufacturing billions of tonnes of plastics. They can be recycled a couple of times, of which about 2% actually gets recycled, & then they're only good for polluting landfill & oceans.

Who cares? There's enough landfill space to store it all, securely in a way that doesn't leak or pollute, thousands of times over. We don't lack the ability to do that, only the will and the coordination.

It's a complete non-problem.

To which I say, "What? Your freedom to pollute the land & oceans that everyone else depends on?"

With all due respect, I love this premise and hate this conclusion. Absolutely no one has the right to pollute the oceans.

At the same time getting a plastic bag and putting it in a sealed trash bag that goes into a garbage truck that goes into a sealed landfill is not rocket science. It requires effort on the part of citizens to ensure trash makes it into the stream and it requires diligence on the part of the bodies that regulate landfills to ensure they are built and operated according to best principle.

Ultimately I guess I'm just sad. There is nothing in principle that prevents us from having plastic bags and plastic straws and disposing of them responsibly. But we just can't mange and so, like children, we can't have those nice things. Which is a sad juxtaposition because even my little kids can successfully get most of their trash into the bin.

To their credit, the store we used to go to tried all kinds of alternatives. The sad fact is that none worked to the satisfaction of the customers and they went back to plastic.

It doesn't. The cost of a plastic milk or yogurt container is quite a bit lower than glass, and it is much lighter during transport where costs are proportional to weight.

You'd really be surprised how little oil is required to make some things. Those thin plastic bags are barely a thimbleful of oil.

[ And in before, it's utterly craven and irresponsible for them to be disposed in a way that goes in the river or oceans. If we as a species can't learn to put our trash in bags and securely get those bags to a landfill that is isolated from the environment, then we deserve the cost of having to go paper/reusable. It's a "this is why can't we have nice things" scenario IMHO. ]

Part of it is.

Digital signature support is pretty widespread across productivity software. Where the fun begins is managing the signing keys.

Docusign isn't really selling the signature feature(indeed, to be worth using, they pretty much have to use the standardized options mentioned in the various standards that give e-signatures legal force); they're selling abstracting the key management away from you; and the service of offering a 'free' barebones setup that the people you send forms to can use to sign them regardless of whether or not they are set up properly in terms of software, signing keys, etc. That's why accounts that can send stuff out for signature are $$(with stuff that has full workflow integration for hooking into ERP systems and stuff being $$$); but it's free to create a basic login if someone sends you something requesting a signature.

It's hard to hold out too much hope for them, or at least their margins, longterm; since the signatures are standardized, productivity software vendors already support them, and (aside from people who are looking to offer basically the same thing as Docusign, like Adobe's offering they push with Acrobat) the people trying to set themselves up as big players in authentication(eg. facebook and google serving as logins for a variety of 3rd party websites; Apple having IDs tied very closely to their users on all Apple devices; MS' AAD-related stuff on the corporate side and MS accounts on the consumer side); would find it relatively simple; were they interested; to generate a signing key tied to their accounts and offer that as another feature.

"Which is not to say there isn't a gradient of "fake"; obviously some are more manipulated ( or fabricated ) than others. Doesn't change the underlying point, however."

That's arguably why it deserves to be classified as 'malarkey'. He's responding to accusations that his just-hallucinate-in-details-the-optics-can't-gather system is faking by making the (true) statement that all photos are fake in order to change the subject from whether all photos are fake in the same way and to the same degree(which is obviously untrue; and presumably why he doesn't really want to mount a defense there).

A lot of the best deception is achieved when you can avoid telling outright lies, with the accompanying risk of being called on them, and focus on misleading truths instead.

Arguably it depends on whether you are expecting sudo to act as a rigid security barrier that you can use to create accounts if intermediate privilege; or whether you are treating it mostly as a tool for people you'd give root to reduce the amount of stuff they actually run as root.

It's pretty tricky to use it as a security barrier, even when it works perfectly, because so many of the tools that you'd potentially want to use sudo to grant access to are not really designed to restrict the user: once you have a package manager running as root you can use it to do basically anything by installing a package that imposes the changes you want; all kinds of utilities can just pop a shell or be used to edit files; etc. Even if sudo itself is free of holes; you'd really need a whole set of deliberately constrained utilities in order to prevent it from being used for privilege escalation. At that point it probably makes more sense to rethink the security model from the other direction; and focus on reducing the number of operations that are root-only in favor of ones that can be delegated to groups.

Where it's much more useful is allowing someone who is basically trusted as root to not just log in as root and run giant chunks of software that don't need(and probably shouldn't be trusted with) high privileges with high privileges just because they logged in as root and so everything they do is running as root.

That's what amazes me.

Maybe I'm just old; but "Signature Authority List" is supposed to mean what it says(possibly blue pen if you really are old; cryptographic if you aren't); it doesn't mean "verbal authorization in a video chat that may or may not even be being recorded somewhere with retention policies set".

I'd be more sympathetic if this were one of the low-value ones where someone impersonates the CEO and tells a random executive assistant or other fairly low-on-the-food-chain employee to make a relatively petty cash transfer to the scammers: you have to feel bad for the person who doesn't want to hassle the big boss, even if they have doubts; but someone with approval authority in the multiple millions is someone whose job description(implicitly or explicitly) is to be slightly prickly about actually approving things.

I'm curious whether the backend for hosting this is disproportionately complex(either following a design from when 19GB of data was still something of some note; or perhaps quite literally a configuration that has been brought forward for a couple of decades with only minimal changes, I'd assume that it's not still running on literally the same FTP servers it started on); whether it was someone's passion project and they are retiring/died; or whether the bean counters are looking so carefully and squeezing so tight that university IT isn't being allowed to throw a pittance at preserving a piece of history that they can't cross charge to another cost center.

Coming from working on much more recent systems it's a little hard to wrap my head around; we have Legal browbeating people and having us enforce retention policies specifically to keep vastly larger amounts of data from just being inadvertently retained because it's actively a hassle to go through and weed things out; and while storing it doesn't cost nothing it often compares favorably to the cost of determining who can give the OK to delete it and hassling them.

I can only assume that, given its age, this system has a lot more infrastructure complexity(possibly understood best by people who are leaving or gone) per GB; so it's not really about the disk space, or the brutal bandwidth load imposed by the tiny OS/2 enthusiast community; but about a comparatively fiddly backend.

Either that or someone in bean counting is being astonishingly petty.

Aside from the potential effect on upgrades of "the lost decade"(or decades, sources differ) that started in the early 90s; it actually seems like a reasonably common pattern: technology buildouts that are impressive and functional for their time have a habit of becoming entrenched and(through some combination of relative adequacy vs. rev.1 of the new stuff and incumbents with investments they don't want to write off) remaining stickier longer than one would like.

We certainly saw a similar thing in the US with, say, wireline telco: you may not have loved the monopoly prices; but aggressive coverage levels were a national policy, reliability was high, and Bell Labs was doing all sorts of neat stuff. That all proved to be...unhelpful...when it came to cellular adoption at either reasonable prices or with reasonable handset features: stateside a Blackberry was the future; everyone else was dealing with carrier-locked BREW garbage and paying per-SMS(and paying more for WAP, except that that sucked so much that most people couldn't be bothered); while over in Europe pay-per-SMS was much less of a thing; and Symbian-type arguably-smartphones were reasonably common; and Japan had i-mode and all the handsets built around its still-a-weird-proprietary-mess-but-way-the-hell-better-than-WAP capabilities.

Of course, that ended up being the same phenomenon again, in its turn: US carrier-based services(SMS, MMS, WAP, etc.) were expensive or hot garbage or both; which made the US market ripe for rapid adoption of 'contemporary' style smartphones that do support cellular standards; but are fundamentally oriented around doing as much as possible over TCP/IP with the carrier just acting as a pipe; because only Blackberries were even remotely non-garbage as more telco-oriented 'smart' phones. In Europe and Japan the old style didn't last forever; but the relative quality and sophistication of pre-"It's all just TCP/IP on a small computer; right?" style designs actually gave the iphones and androids a run for their money. In some cases (like ability to do contactless payments in certain subway systems and things from your phone) the new gear remained a regression in certain respects for years afterwards.

There is the additional complication of whether 'cloud' just means "VPS" or whether you are hitting the more abstracted tools that most of the cloud guys offer.

They'll all certainly sell you very classical VMs, just with more room to scale them up or down or bring more online than you probably have at home; but you are starting to look at architectural changes if you wander into the "managed instance" or "serverless" offerings(Cosmos or Aurora DB; AWS Lambada or Azure Functions; S3 buckets; etc.)

Obviously those are still someone else's computer under the hood; "serverless" just means that it's hidden and you can't touch it; not that it's truly absent; but if you start hitting those sorts of services you are making changes that mean that "your datacenter vs. their datacenter" only remains true at a fairly high level: if you wanted to move back you'd either have to change back how you are doing some things; or go with something like Openstack that is dedicated to making your computers present AWS-style abstractions.

For emergency backup you're welcome to throw a $20 battery + crank AM radio in your glovebox. Not sure why people insist that the automaker has to build it in to the car itself if it's really just meant for emergency purposes.

A replacement for AM broadcast radio would need to be as bulletproof

We're not talking about replacing the stations, only saying that if you want this option, to go Amazon and grab a $20 AM radio and throw it in your glovebox. Has crank power too, in case the batteries are dead -- so you'll be able to receive any broadcasts no matter what. And as a triple bonus, you can take that with you out of the car and listen to emergency AM elsewhere.

Why in the world does this need to be litigated as though it's an indispensable piece of built-in equipment for the vehicle or that it would be impossible for a customer to add one later for emergency purposes.

You do it Musk's way or FU

You mean, you do it Musk's way or you go into the car settings and flip a switch.

I say this respectfully, but of all the possible things Elon may or may not have done wrong, giving customers the choice to have their camera watch and record motion seems like really small fries.

At the absolute most, you're complaining about whether the switch is on or off by default (or always prompts the user for a setting during initial car setup). A veritable molehill.

It is also a LOT easier to both post content and reach a lot of people via social media as opposed to doing both using your own website.

Once upon a time, in the long long ago, I could create content on my site and then automatically or semi-automatically share it on social media, where my social media followers would see it.